A new database: “The Parliamentary Deployment Votes Database (PDVD)”

Have a look at this new terrific debates on parliamentary votes on the deployment of armed forces.

Here you’ll find all the info on this OPEN database. Here you’ll find all the data. And here some details on the international network that has built this database.

As stated in their website, since the end of the Cold War, democracies have been participating in military missions of various kinds, ranging from peacekeeping to war. These deployments have raised questions about their democratic legitimacy and parliamentary control in particular. In many democracies, deployments decisions are the exclusive competence of the government, and parliament is only informed. In a growing number of cases, however, such decisions have been put to a vote in parliament. PDVD documents and analyzes these votes. PDVD serves a dual purpose: As scholars of political science, we are interested in an analysis of deployment votes. By sharing the data we collected, we hope to stimulate further analyses. As citizens of countries that have participated in military missions, we consider the publication of deployment votes to be a contribution to the democratic control of security and defense policy. At the moment, in version 2 of the dataset, PDVP documents 514 votes in plenaries for the period between August 1990 and December 2017 in Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Slovakia, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

We believe that this database could be extremely useful for scholars interested in parties, military operations, and parliaments.